Explosives disappear from Iraqi facility

? The U.N.’s nuclear watchdog agency reported Monday that massive quantities of high explosives at an Iraqi weapons facility have disappeared, including some under U.N. seal because of its potential use to detonate a nuclear bomb.

U.N. and Iraqi officials indicated the explosives were lost while the country was under U.S. occupation. But U.S. officials suggested that the munitions may have disappeared before the U.S.-led forces established full control over the country. They said a search of the facility by U.S. troops shortly after the fall of Baghdad last year turned up no evidence of the explosives.

The conflicting accounts generated confusion about who bore responsibility for allowing the loss of the explosives that had been stored at the sprawling Qaqaa weapons facility outside Baghdad before the war. The munitions included the explosives RDX, PETN and HMX.

HMX, the only one of the three under U.N. seal, has application as a nuclear trigger. But it and the other two also can be used to demolish buildings, down jetliners and produce warheads for missiles.

The disappearance of the material raised the possibility that some already could have found its way into explosive devices used against U.S. and allied troops in Iraq — or could do so in the future. But U.S. officials in both Washington and Baghdad played down such a likelihood, noting the car bombs and roadside explosives that have menaced troops up to now have tended to be made from old artillery shells or dynamite.

Pentagon and State Department officials said the matter had been referred to the Iraq Survey Group, a CIA-run agency charged with accounting for what became of Iraq’s unconventional weapons programs. But Charles A. Duelfer, a former U.N. weapons inspector who heads the group, said in a telephone interview that he had received no such orders.

Duelfer also said that a U.S. team inspecting the site in May 2003 turned up no evidence of explosives under U.N. seal.

The Al Qaqaa complex in Yousefiya is 19 miles south of Baghdad, Iraq. Several hundred tons of conventional explosives are missing from the former Iraqi military facility that once played a key role in Saddam Hussein's efforts to build a nuclear bomb, the U.N. nuclear agency confirmed Monday.

“My sense is, it’s been looted, it’s gone missing,” he said of the material. “I don’t know the specifics, but it’s not there now.”

Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, presented the U.N. Security Council with an Oct. 10 letter from the interim Iraqi government reporting the loss of the explosives. Word of the letter was reported Monday by The New York Times and CBS News.

The disclosure came less than a month after ElBaradei warned the council that U.N. satellite photos had detected “widespread and apparently systematic dismantlement” of buildings linked to Iraq’s former covert nuclear weapons program. Those buildings “housed high-precision equipment” that had been subject to U.N. monitoring during Saddam Hussein’s reign.